2003 in video games: another weird arcade game, more Pokémon and SimCity, and Mario Kart has its day

 

If you've been following along with my arcade posts, then you know the story from these early 2000s: Street Fighter, and other games like it, aren't top dog anymore because you could play it on your console at home. So, the arcades were trying to bring you into the mall by mixing up games with playing cards and other tangible elements to go along with the experience. 

In 2003, the extra touch was a card featuring your very own fighting beetle that you'd send into battle in this unusual looking game called Mushiking. Check out some footage here and please tell me if you see this anywhere out in the wild.

And it's cool to see Sega still owning all these top games in the arcade while their home console empire was nearly finished its steady collapse. 

In the handheld gaming market, Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire maintains its hold on the top-selling spot, and Nintendo also gets a rare win for these times in the home console wars with Mario Kart: Double Dash stepping up as best-seller for home console games, specifically for the Gamecube.

I've played this plenty of times, so I found an emulator and just gave it a quick spin. I'm not about to claim that getting first place in the Mushroom Cup at 50cc is worth crowing about, but that's where I left things.

Finally, SimCity returns with big sales for the PC market in its fourth version. I found this one much more intuitive than the original and, as I was building a seemingly effective (though admittedly ugly) city, I tried to take a screenshot for this post but it seems there's something in Steam that blocks taking them? Makes sense, I guess. Anyway, trust me: it was ugly. But Bob and Sophia were happy to move in, so who else do I really need to please?

Well, my fire chief, who - get this - wanted a road connecting the station to the neighbourhood! Patience, chief, I was working on it.

And one of my advisors wanted me to cut spending on hospitals, which was frankly way too real-life for me to deal with so I ignored her.

I'll get back to being mayor of the aptly named "New City" later because I was enjoying this one very much.

2003 in music: Evanescence lands at the perfect time and Sam Roberts wows me

 

Take care of your library materials, folks - the CD cover/booklet is lost to time.

While every album naturally sounds like it belongs to a certain era, even if it's not the era in which it was actually released, I can't think of any other album that sounds so specifically tied to a single year as much as Evanescence's Fallen, top selling album of the year. It sounds so much like 2003 that I don't think it could have been released in any other year. That kinda weak, tinny-sounding guitar and the combination of nu-metal rap and singing belongs right where it is.

For the record, I much prefer the non-metal infused tracks like Hello, which was new to me, and My Immortal, which I've loved since the video was on rotation. 

Now, onto the Juno-winning Album of the Year by Sam Roberts, We Were Born In a Flame. I expected to get what I've received from a number of unfamiliar records over this project, which would be to hear the hit songs that I knew and then to amble my way through a bunch of filler rock tracks. I don't even mind filler rock tracks, but I was pleasantly surprised to receive an album of much more than that.

The hits are great: Brother Down, Don't Walk Away Eileen, and Where Have All the Good People Gone don't disappoint. What makes the disc great is that there really isn't any filler and a lot of care went into the whole album. A couple of songs near the middle are my initial favourites - those would be Dead End and Every Part of Me - but I'm eager to get back to this album and find some more.

2003 in movies: A double bill of Best Picture winners

 

I could be proven wrong, of course, but I don't think this is going to happen again in my project. The top-grossing movie of the year, Finding Nemo, also received the Oscar for Best Animated Picture, while Return of the King took home the classic Best Picture, I guess you'd call it? So, I get an Oscar two-fer.

Finding Nemo felt like the culmination of that incredible first run of Pixar movies, and while Monsters Inc. is my personal favourite, I recognize Finding Nemo as Pixar at its peak. It's beautiful, funny, and a heart-killer like only Pixar stuff can be.

It was also the last Pixar movie my wife and I watched before our son arrived in late summer, so we considered it our final primer for parenting. 

Now, to continue the story, the final installment of The Lord of the Rings arrived in theatres after our son was born, and we weren't quite up for a three and a half hour-ish trip out of the house yet, so my mom helped us out by babysitting for us twice. We watched the movie until a point near halfway, went home, and came back late for another showing to pick up where we'd left off. It turns out that the scene with Grond, that's the giant, flaming battering ram up above, was our marker.

Anyway, what to say? It's a tremendous final chapter to the trilogy, but then, it's not really a sequel, just like the books aren't either; they're just sectioned parts of one long book. The point is that it was going to take a monumental screw-up to not finish the run of movies on the same level of quality as the rest. 

I haven't actually watched the theatrical version in a while, and as much as I love the extra bloating in each of the extended editions, I'd forgotten (or shrugged off) how lean and effective the actual Oscar winning is.

And I'd better share my favourite LOTR meme here:

CSI holds onto top spot in 2003's TV ratings

 

I'm into week two of CSI and waiting to see if I will like this show any better the second time around. 

Well, no. I still find its tone oddly juvenile, with the lead-in to many commercial breaks featuring a lame and/or awkwardly inappropriate pun. I still find the murders and investigations to have the feel of being clever, without the cleverness to back it up. 

And, to really seal the deal for me to not take this show seriously, tell me this scene doesn't feel like it's right out of Police Squad!

As my daughter suggested, if they'd just had the heart jumping up and down, they'd have nailed it. 

2003: The Da Vinci Code cashes in on conspiracy and controversy

The first and only other time I've read this book, best seller in 2003, was only a couple of years after it came out. It was recommended by my mother as a light, fun read, but being the younger, slightly more impressionable reader that I was, I couldn't believe what I had in my hands. How is this not setting the world on fire? Dan Brown has unlocked a two-millennium old secret!

Well, I'm older and wiser now, of course, and so I recognize that it's easy to posit sensational theories about unverifiable historical events.  Let's just put all of that aside.

What hasn't changed is that Brown is great at writing that makes you keep reading. Every chapter ends with a hook, and sometimes those chapters are a page and half long so you don't have much time to think before you launch forwards. 

It's a much better book than a movie, to be sure.

Oh, and be careful about including any in-the-moment astounding statistics, such as the incredible 500MB/sec download speed that Brown wows us with. It's guaranteed to not age well. 

A simple tribute to the 2002 introduction of the greatest soda

Sometimes it's available in Canada, sometimes I have to hit up a Wegman's to find some, and sometimes, for pure joy, I find some who-knows-how-old-these-are bottles or cans in the back of a convenience store fridge. That's where this one pictured came from.

I remember when it was announced that its first run was coming to an end I panic-bought several cases, dipping in patiently until something, I'm guessing freezing because I had them in the basement next to an outside wall, started taking cans out one by one. It was very disappointing.

2002's Middlesex's fascinating, singular nature leads it to the Pulitzer Prize

 

This book, Jeffrey Eugenides' follow-up to his similarly acclaimed novel The Virgin Suicides, is a wild read on a couple of levels.

Firstly, let's talk about what would probably be the 2026 elephant in the room, though it's hard to tell if it was in 2002, too. This is a book told largely from the perspective of a young woman named Calliope who, by the end of the book, has finished a transition to a young man named Cal. The "elephant" is that Eugenides doesn't have that perspective. Mind you, he doesn't have the perspective of an ageing Greek grandmother either, but he sure writes it.

That's the thing about this book: it's so well-written that any questions that arise about the author's life experience disappeared in my reading experience. I mean, he sews in a lot of his experience as a Greek-American from Detroit, so the broad, sprawling timeline of the story moves from Greece in the throes of conflict with Turkey, to race-based conflict in the Motor City, as Cal tells generations' worth of stories through some first-hand experience, some first-person accounts, and some piecing together from stories and conjecture.

It tore at my heart so many times and, like the best books that I've read in this project, the end brought a sadness as I said goodbye to characters I genuinely care about. 

2002 in video games: More arcade gimmicks, Pokémon, Warcraft, and GTA

 

The pattern of arcades in the early 2000s trying to draw in gamers by offering what they can't duplicate on a home system continues, as the top-earning game is the monster apparatus you see above, Sega's World Club Champion Football. Like some other previous top games, it has a big screen, a shared experience with multiple inputs, and offers a hybrid gaming/collecting experience with players using trading cards to create teams to then play on the game.

I'd really love to find one of these big systems to play somewhere down the line.

Being only a recently indoctrinated fan of Pokémon games, I'm experiencing all of these original games for the first time. The thing is, because I only give myself an introductory sample of gameplay for each of these, it's a little repetitive. Start off in my house, go talk to a Professor with a tree for a last name, choose my Pokémon (this time I made the choice my daughter would have), go win a couple of battles, and call it a day.

I will say that the introduction to this year's best-selling handheld game, Ruby/Sapphire, did have a funny, but oddly though-provoking bit in the beginning as my avatar was moving to a new home, and my mom hits me with this:

I mean, it's always an intriguing part of the Pokémon world that has you collecting creatures to fight one another for sport, but they can also be slave labourers? Huh.

Next up, I'm just watching some gameplay of Warcraft III, the top-selling PC game for the year because, alas, I didn't find a site to give it a play. At least I can recognize the mechanics from Starcraft and similar games that have ruled the PC roost in previous years, though with such advancements that the connection might be hard to recognize. 

From reading some contemporary reviews and commentary about the pre-orders and hype around the release, I can see that missed a big deal at the time, but I just wasn't playing these types of games at the time. 

Speaking of which, here we go: my first time playing any iteration of Grand Theft Auto. In 2002, it was Vice City for the PS2 as the top-selling game of the year.

I knew from the outset that this was going to necessarily be one of the games that I barely crack, just to get the flavour of it. I also knew, just from what I'd heard about the games, that it would afford me the opportunity to play an open world game the way I like to play it: ostensibly, not playing it. I like to wander, I like to explore, and I like to avoid the main storyline for long stretches at a time. 

So, that's me up there, learning that I could stand on the hood of a taxi and let it drive me around for a bit. After that, there was a terrible misunderstanding where I came upon two cops in a fistfight with a suspect and, since I happened to walk by one of the officers who'd fallen and dropped his gun, I picked it up without intending to and all of a sudden - I'm the suspect. That's not fair. I managed to out-run them and ended up on a beach where I wanted to see if I could swim. I couldn't. 

After re-spawning, I gave cops a wide berth and ended up in a nightclub where, I swear, I just wanted to chat with a guy who looked like a bouncer standing by the bar and the bartender shot me with a shotgun?! Was this Tech Noir?

That was enough for me to get a taste of GTA. I know I'll be returning to the franchise again anyway, so I'll see if I can find a less dangerous path the next time around.

2002's movies: Spider-Man sticks the landing and Chicago has it (the Oscar) coming

 

While X-Men (2000) had recently stood upon the shoulders of Batman and Superman to announce the arrival of a new generation of super-hero movies, Spider-Man is, for me, the starting point for everything that would follow in the genre. 

The top-grossing movie of the year, it tells a perfectly re-told origin story, nails the casting, and does what the best CGI-infused movies do, especially in these still nearly-early days, which is to keep them at a distance to obscure the uncanny valley as best as possible. In that way, Spider-Man is among the best heroes to animate because the face can't screw it up - even now in 2026, it's still the face that screws it up.

Always happy to re-watch this eminently re-watchable movie.

Thanks for a diligent, data-recording friend, I know that I saw this movie in January of 2003, so not that long before it would win the Oscar for Best Picture. Since it was part of a multi-movie day, I'm going to guess that it was paid at least in part by cereal box coupons which covered a lot of movies around that time. I don't think I've seen it since.

First of all, it's cool that a modern-era musical won the Oscar. It was, like Spider-Man, wonderfully cast, and I'll admit that I'd completely forgotten about the marionnette sequence which looked fantastic. Really, it's all style and the conceit of playing around with what's real and what's a musical of the mind was a terrific way to make a musical make sense when they didn't anymore in the movies.

Something funny about my viewing: I watched it on Crave and, as is usual for me, I had the closed captioning on. For whatever reason, the people (or program) in charge of creating the captions was feeling rather wholesome. While colloquial cursing was coming through loud and clear in the audio, the demure closed captioning hit me with phrases like "My eye," "Rats," "Gosh darn," and my favourite: "Joan of Arc" in place of "Jesus Christ". 

It reminded me of Anchorman bloopers featuring Ferrell riffing of made-up exclamations like "Hot pot of coffee!"

Another sidenote: I remember singing Razzle Dazzle in an ensemble in a musical drama program sometime in late elementary school, but I don't expect that I knew or cared what show it came from. The next time I saw a song from the show was when my son was starting high school and was part of a night of arts performances. The musical that year, which he wasn't involved with, was Chicago, so they put on their version of Cell Block Tango. 

I couldn't help but think of every dad in the theatre that night looking like this...

2002 in music: Jones and Lavigne take the honours

That same kind of jazzy, easy-listening effort that propelled Diana Krall to a Juno last year paid off for Norah Jones in 2002, giving her the top-selling album of the year. The mega-hit Don't Know Why is a funny kind of marker for me as, at this time, I'm about to move into a new phase of my life. My first child arrives next year - 2003, that is - and, though I'm sure I was aware of the song when it first released, it was really Jones' appearance on Sesame Street a couple of years after that lodged the song in my memory.

The rest of the album has some nice covers (Cold Cold Heart worked best for me), and the original standouts are Shoot the Moon and Painter Song.

It's been a while since I listened to anything off this album, Juno winner for Album of the Year, and it turns out that I didn't know much of the tracks past the first few. I probably just didn't pay much attention after I'm With You, which I love, and maybe I just skipped back to that and listened to it again instead of carrying on.

I was struck by how the first track, Losing Grip, sounds very inspired by Alanis Morissette, followed by a sudden gear change for Complicated. Then there's Nobody's Fool, featuring Lavigne taking her best shot at a Lisa Lopes rap, so stylistically this album is all over the place.

Also, and this is another marker for what was going on at the time, I remember that this was one of the first albums that I downloaded through Limewire. So, now that I'm thinking it through, it would make sense that I never actually had the whole album and might have just cherry-picked what to download. I'm not proud of this.

2002's top TV show CSI spins-off with two guest stars close to my heart

 

I've never watched an episode of CSI and I'll attribute that to two things, one of which is functional and one is kind of inexplicably petty. First up: I just wasn't watching a lot of TV during that time. Survivor, yes, but I'm hard-pressed to think of what else. Gone were the heady university days of recording a number of shows on a VHS (including NYPD Blue, which will be an important detail soon enough) to watch on the weekends when I came home from campus.

The other reason: I've just never liked watching William Peterson. I'll bet he's a nice guy, but I didn't care much for Manhunter and I skipped Fear because Mark Wahlberg sure wasn't going to convince me. 

So, now that I'm browsing for an episode of the year's top-rated show to watch online I discover one called Cross Jurisdictions, which I learn will serve as the introduction to their Miami spin-off. That's reason enough to pick that episode, but add in David Caruso making his triumphant return to TV after departing NYPD Blue for nothing much more than Kiss of Death and it was an easy choice.

Then along came one more surprise that turned this into the kind of slam dunk viewing that makes me question a cosmic plan.

The show itself was fine. It had those groovy inside-the-body shots that I remember first seeing used in Three Kings. It was quippy, but was also playing itself off as really smart with an intricate, artistic murder as the hook. It was sort of like the movie Seven if it was made by MTV.

The funniest stuff, unintentionally funny but necessary, came as the Miami team all made their introductions to the Vegas squad because, of course, they were really introducing themselves to the audience. To that extent, each of them had a little character moment as they verbalized some idiosyncrasy meant to endear them to us. And, hey, they got ten seasons out of Miami so obviously people bought in.

Okay, here's the main event: in the opening sequence, there was a party where a familiar woman was flirting with John Kapelos, but when she called him "Chief" I forgot about trying to place how I knew her and instead tried to remember if Kapelos played some kind of police chief to Steve Martin's fire chief in Roxanne, and whether this could be some sort of unauthorized sequel. I hope not, mind you, because Kapelos was dead within minutes. 

As luck would have it, the familiar woman returned later on and this time it hit me dead-on: this was the one, the only, the legendary Red-Blooded American Girl herself, Kari Wuhrer. 

Of course, those that know her will definitely know her from other things, but I will always know her from exactly both of the mid-90s movies that I worked on as a driver and general slave labourer: Red Blooded American Girl 2 (later titled without the "American Girl") and The Undertaker's Wedding. While the latter became notable because of the young kid named Adrian Brody in the cast, Red Blooded 2 was most famous to me because I managed to park my red Chevy Cavalier in a spot where I knew it would end up in the background of a shot, and I later terrified Burt Young in that same car as I turned a corner on set and he stopped right in front of me, deer-in-the-headlights-frozen-in-his-tracks, while I hit the brakes and, by not running him over, gifted the world one more performance as Pauly in Rocky Balboa about ten years later.

Thanks, David Caruso, for inspiring me to pick an episode that served up a nice trip down memory lane. 

2001 in movies: Ron Howard redeems himself in my eyes, and 10,000 points for Gryffindor

 

Something occurred to me during this, my third or fourth viewing of Harry Potter and Sorcerer's/Philosopher's Stone, the box-office winner for 2001: Daniel Radcliffe will be, but is not yet at this age, a good actor; Rupert Grint has one acting move here (his mugging), but he's so good at it he's forgiven other youthful deficiencies; and Tom Felton has a couple of sublime moments but is otherwise short of material to work with. 

But Emma Watson? Watson arrived as a complete actor in child form in this movie like a spiritual successor to Kirsten Dunst. 

Speaking of Felton, and more specifically Draco: part of what leaves me cold about the first three movies, and most especially the first two, is how everything works in Potter's favour and falls into his lap. Part of that is that he's got Ron, who is somewhat clever, and Hermione, who is brilliant. Malfoy, on the other hand, is managing to keep stride with Potter, despite everybody favouring Harry over him, and who are his lieutenants? Yeah, Crabbe and Goyle, who offer nothing and he knows it. 

What I'm saying is that Potter is the chosen one, sure, but Draco outworks him and would have made a better wizard under different circumstances.

Now, Ron Howard is no indie, experimental, gonzo filmmaker. You're going to get something sweet, with a happy ending, and a minimal amount of tension. But when he's on, he can expertly toe the line between Hallmark movie-of-the-week and, in the case of A Beautiful Mind, a Best Picture winner.

The fact that this movie was his follow-up to How the Grinch Stole Christmas pretty well sums up his limited range - or maybe, to be fair, it's a limited interest on his part.

Here's the thing, though: I love this movie. I remember seeing it in the theatre by myself and taking my wife to see it the very next night. It's built for re-watches, because you'll be spotting things placed as red herrings or disguised in some way all throughout the film. 

Crowe did an expert job of dismissing his toughness in place for mannerisms that Kirk Lazarus would have surely applauded. I don't know if it's reductive of a life and a divergence, but it's a great performance in a wonderful movie. 

2001's top-selling book offers a sequel to the Bible

I've never read a book quite like this before, nor had quite the reading experience such as this. 

If, like me, you're not familiar with this best-selling book of 2001, you'll probably at least have heard of the series Left Behind, if only because you, again like me, became vaguely aware that the heroically-cool-in-the-80s Kirk Cameron grew up to star in a series of movies based on that book series about those "left behind" after true believers were ushered off into heaven. 

This is the ninth book (!) in the series of sixteen books (!) but, since some later books were written as prequels, this is actually the twelfth book chronologically. Keen readers will note that when I realized that two Pulitzer Prize winning books by John Updike were actually the third and fourth part of a quadrilogy, I felt that I owed it to the series to read all four.  I did not feel that same pull with Desecration, so I jumped right into the middle of the story, and I imagine this is what it must have felt like for someone to watch Avengers: Infinity War without having seen anything from the MCU ahead of time.

The first five pages feature quick introductions to twenty-one characters so you could have some hope of following the story. This whole series must have been one of the greatest "what if?" pitches with the idea that the Rapture (that's the transported to heaven part) is really happening. It's a great pitch because it's an intriguing twist on a 2000-year-old book, and it's a great pitch for readers who would love to hear a tale of the Rapture happening in contemporary times with people named Buck and Mac fighting for the rest of humanity from the Antichrist.

As a book, it does its essential work of moving a story along just fine, and maybe I would have to read the entire saga to fully appreciate the breadth of artistry it takes to craft such a long tale, but it ultimately feels like it's playing to a pre-determined audience and already knows it's guaranteed their attention - and I'm just not in that audience.

2001 in video games: arcades adapt while Final Fantasy, Pokémon, and The Sims all march on

The number-one arcade game for 2001 shows that times were a-changin', because it's not an arcade game: it's a photo booth.

A couple of names of these number-one "games" popped up in my research: Canvas Shot and Flash Shot, but I couldn't find actual images of either machine, and obviously no gameplay, either. Even the runner-up game, certainly the number-one in North America, was Derby Owners Club, a horse racing game that didn't operate like what had become a standard arcade game.

(photo source in link)

I couldn't find a gameplay option for that one either, but that's because it relied on player cards that you would insert to register your horse in a race and could play it on different machines. It had a huge video screen and seated gameplay console monitors, and looks more like one of the 1970s cabinet games that I was researching at the start of my project. 

In either case, whether it's a photo booth or an oversized racing game, what's clear is that in 2001, after nearly twenty years of home video games stealing more and more of their quarter-paying customers, the arcades were ready to rely on hooks and gimmicks that a PlayStation couldn't offer, just like movie theatres have been doing since coming out of quarantine and trying to woo people back to the cinema with ScreenX, 4DX, and popcorn buckets. 

Meanwhile, on the home front, Pokémon Gold and Silver continues its reign as the best-selling handheld game for the Game Boy Colour (and OG Game Boy, too), while The Sims also keeps its hold on the top spot for home computer games.

On the PlayStation 2, Final Fantasy X makes the leap that I experienced between FFVII and VIII feel like a minor upgrade compared to what was waiting for me in watching this gameplay. And yes, I watched a gameplay video for Final Fantasy X, partly because I was again struggling to find a site that hosted it and partly because the video I found was a crazy forty-something hour-long full playthrough. It's hard to even tell how long it is because it breaks the YouTube counter about two-thirds of the way through.

I won't even pretend that I watched the whole thing, but I did stay with it for the first several minutes and then jumped around to a few different parts while staying away from the ending because, you never know, I might play it someday.

Again, the leap forward is astounding and I'm retroactively really happy for all of the Final Fantasy fans who must have been blown away by this game. 

2001 in music: P!nk and Diana Krall are the big winners

It has been a long time since I've listened to M!ssundaztood by P!nk (sure, I'll go along with the stylizations; after all, I went years typing out variations of O{+> for Prince) and, while I still enjoyed parts of the record immensely, it didn't feel quite as groundbreaking as I remember. Obviously, part of that is that I'm not listening to it in 2001, so I guess I'm really saying that parts haven't aged that well. Also, it's probably safe to say that it was more groundbreaking for P!nk and not as an album on the whole. 

My favourite hit remains the same, which is Don't Let Me Get Me, and the best non-singles are probably the back-to-back Respect and 18-Wheeler. After that, the album starts to feel a bit long. I never really dug the duet with Steven Tyler, and Dear Diary is just an odd song that has her spend part of the time explaining how a diary works and then the rest of the time doing the opposite of that.

Then again, don't listen to me: it was the top album of 2001 for a reason.

I've never, to my recollection, listened to this whole album by Diana Krall which would win the Juno for Best Album. It's a prototypical throwback and a lovely set of songs (Cry Me a River and The Night We Called It a Day are my standouts), but I can't help but wonder if the Juno award came as a result of its uniqueness in a field including Sum 41, Our Lady Peace, and Nickelback up for the award. Even Nelly Furtado's debut, also up for Best Album, was positively headbanging compared to Krall's gentle collection.

Or, maybe it's just a great album! I'm actually slightly alarmed by how both of my reviews in this post are a bit sardonic. That had better not be because I'm at the halfway point of the project and getting to be a cranky old man.

2001 in TV: Friends claims the top spot

 

As Friends wrapped up its seventh season and rolled into its eighth, it topped the ratings for the first and only time in its ten seasons, presumably fuelled by both the finale and premiere featuring Monica and Chandler's wedding.

Although I didn't watch the show on live TV much after the first season, I did eventually catch up on the whole thing on DVD. I felt then, as I did in this re-watch of these episodes, that this gang was getting a bit old to be caught up in the high school-ish shenanigans of who likes whom and oh-my-gosh-she's-pregnant-but-who's-the-father?